Coral Woodbury and Griselda Pollock In Conversation
January 11, 2022 6:00 pm - 7:30 pmWe are delighted to be hosting an online in-conversation between artist Coral Woodbury and art historian Griselda Pollock. To register for this free talk, please email gallery@hackelbury.co.uk and you will be sent a Zoom link.
The conversation accompanies Coral Woodbury’s solo exhibition at HackelBury Fine Art and will explore the inspiration and process behind her work.
Coral Woodbury (b. 1971) critically reinterprets Western artistic heritage from a feminist perspective. She has participated in numerous residencies, including in Italy with rosenclaire, with whom she has worked for nearly 30 years. Coral exhibits nationally and internationally, recently including Opening Press Week of the 58th Venice Biennale. In 2020 she was a finalist for the international Mother Art Prize, culminating in the Procreate Project exhibition at Cromwell Place in London. In 2021 she participated in the exhibition ‘Call and Response’ at Newport Art Museum, Rhode Island. In 2018 she took part in the ‘Humanities Approaches to the Opioid Crisis, Boston University, the International Travelling Art exhibition at Taragaon Museum, Kathmandu, Nepal and #00Bienal de la Habana, Havana, Cuba and VANITAS#IMPERMANENCE, Traveling Exhibition: Palazzo Reale, Genova; Duino Castle, Trieste, Italy. With Revised Edition, Coral inks portraits of women artists over images from the well-known canon. Using material culture which is available to her – either photographs or self-portraits of the women – Coral makes visible those who are obscured from history. She describes herself as a “historian, gazing backward, and as an artist, creating anew” whose works “are a way to heal the injustices and omissions of art history”. Recognising that women were vital contributors to art history and yet excluded from it both in their own and subsequent times, Coral reclaims space for them. Bringing women together across time and place, she re-recasts and re-crafts the story of art. “What has even been deemed art at all, all of art history was defined and determined by men” explains Coral. As women were for centuries excluded from art institutions and forbidden to perform what was considered essential artistic training, their creative input was often demoted to the areas of art considered as minor as well as domestic decorative crafts. Coral’s inclusion in the Revised Edition of portraits of women artists who were omitted from the realm of High Art, makes a stand against the previous male-dominated versions.
Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History (CentreCATH) at the University of Leeds, where she lectured from 1977-2020. She is the 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize awarded for her life-time’s work on feminism in/and art’s histories. She is also Fellow of the Association for Art History. She has spent five decades developing international, queer, postcolonial, feminist critique of Art History and analyses of art’s diverse histories focussing increasingly on formulating new concepts with which to deliver ‘feminist interventions in art’s histories’: including Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology (1981, 1996, 2013,new edition Bloomsbury, 2020), Vision and Difference (1988, 2003), Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History (1992), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts (1992/96), Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (1999),Encounters in Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007), After-affects/After-images: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum(2013) and the major monograph and first art historical study of the artist, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory [Leben? oder Theater? 1941-43] (Yale, 2018). Forthcoming: Killing Men and Dying Women: Lee Krasner, Marilyn Monroe and Jackson Pollock Meet in the Hot Zone of New York Painting in the 1950s (Manchester University Press, 2022) and a new, all colour edition of Mary Cassatt (World of Art Thames & Hudson, 2022).